Multi-modal exploration of

rugged digital terrain on mobile devices

Antoni Moore, School of Surveying

Mariusz Nowostawski, Department of Information Science

Overview

• Mobile devices are becoming dominant in digital map display (tablets too)– Challenges of small map

display, storage / processing limitations

– Dominance of Google Maps / Earth

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

What about terrain?

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

What do they not communicate?

• The look of a surface?

• The feel of a surface?

• Really?

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

Rolling ball examples

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

What about balls?

• Actively engaged with the data

• “Energy” spent to roll the ball– Gravity, momentum,

force

• Sense of presence– A spherical avatar

• Haptic (and sound) feedback

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

Griffin, 2002

Minimal Requirements

Graphics• OpenGL ES 2.0 (graphics language)

provides direct access to vertex and fragment shaders

Sensors• Accelerometer / Gyroscope• Magnetic sensor

supported on modern Android/iOS smartphone & tablets

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

Development environment: software and hardware

• Android HTC Desire (2.3.7) • Galaxy Nexus (4.1.1)• Eclipse• Android SDK and NDK• GitHub version control

(public version coming soon)

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

Architecture Diagram

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

What goes on behind the scene

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

• Sensors feed data to the scene manager (C++)• Scene Manager

– prepares the scene objects– sets data for renderer in OpenGL rendering engine

• Renderer (mixed C and C++ code and Graphical Library Shader Language, GLSL)

– Dynamically binds vertex and fragment shaders– renders the scene with a given perspective and lighting arrangements

• Processors internally perform – matrix manipulation, matrix algebra and geometry manipulation to create the

scene out of triangles. – Lighting setup is already provided.

• Application is managed from Java through Android Activity, which sets the initial graphical context

• Textures and additional effects currently under development.

Screen shots

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

Data

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012

Summary• Richness of elevation not communicated?• TerrainBall is tilting / twisting the terrain

(the device) to roll the ball• Haptic feedback to add to the visual• Future testing on usability• Where would you use this?• Learning of terrain data – retention

enhanced? (outdoor types, kids)• Adding game like elements?

Presented at ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, Taurewa NZ, 1st – 5th September 2012